Disappointment

Michael Mack is Reader in English Literature at Durham University, UK. Formerly he has been a Visiting Professor at Syracuse University, a Fellow at the University of Sydney, and lecturer and research fellow at the University of Chicago. He is the author of six books, including How Literature Changes the Way We Think (Bloomsbury, 2012), Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2010), and German Idealism and the Jew (2003), which was shortlisted for The Koret Jewish Book Award 2004. He is the editor of the Palgrave Companion to Literature and Philosophy (2018).

• Introduction1. Spinoza and F. H. Jacobi’s idealist disavowal of disappointment or how Romanticism questions Idealisations of the Anthropocene2. Rendering Dialectics Disappointing: Spinoza’s spectre haunting the Anthropocene from Romanticism to Postmodernism in literature and science3. The Destructive element: Keats & Conrad or How Romanticism avows idealism’s disavowed disappointment4. Modernity’s promise and its disavowed disappointment: Hannah Arendt’s Analysis of Totalitarianism out of the Sources of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness5. The trajectory of Conrad’s novel of Disavowed Disappointment: Hegel’s dialectics, Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein6. Political Promises and History’s Disappointments: Leo Strauss as the esoteric centre of Bellow’s Ravelstein and the critique of grand political promises7. Disappointment in the age of the Anthropocene: how D H Lawrence and Kafka render dialectics inoperative8. Disappointing expectations of Redemption: Modern Jewish Writing and Thought9. Conclusion: Expecting Disappointment, or, from Pynchon’s Roth’s, Strauss’s and Vonnegut’s postmodernism to Anna Burn’s Milkman and D. F. Wallace The Pale KingBibliographyAcknowledgmentsIndex

A masterful weave of intellectual history and literary criticism, Disappointment is magisterial in scope and in the depth and originality of its analysis of the ambiguous fortunes of the modern project.